


Now that it's over

by Loktipus



Series: Unhappily ending [2]
Category: Assassin's Creed
Genre: Character Death Fix, Gen, Huge assed spoilers, If you haven't finished it yet this will ruin it, Like, M/M, Spoilers for Ac3
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-11-06
Updated: 2012-11-06
Packaged: 2017-11-18 02:03:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,238
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/555668
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Loktipus/pseuds/Loktipus
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Everything shall begin as the world ends anew.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Now that it's over

 

Worse than anything, was the smell.

 

He'd gone back after, at least a few days. He'd said nothing and slipped out at a Rest stop somewhere in East Jersey. Rebecca just holding onto the wheel because he couldn't

stop shaking long enough to drive after his body shut down. Kings of idiotic ideas as they all are and he'd gone back. There was no way to leave it as it was.

 

He couldn't, not like that, not after everything. Not after Lucy. Not after Clay. Not after Daniel bloody fucking Cross. Because god ( _psychotic space-aliens, or giant omnipotent glowing chickens, or whomever the hell else out there!_ ) knew that one still hurt.

 

They'd all been sitting there at the Burger King across the street trying to pick up on something to do, and at the rate Rebecca was cramming down food just to keep from talking....

 

She had her first cheeseburger for the first time since he'd met her.

 

She wasn't even watching, they were all looking but none of them could see anything. Bill most of all because how do you reconcile with the son you hadn't seen for ten years, when he's emptied out and dead in some dank supercave? When what little time you had had was spent bickering and then said son asking if he could just _**come home?**_ It's not to say that the man is a good father, or even a good person, but there's a river and a moat between hitting your son and watching him die.

 

Desmond had inevitably, all things considered, simply been born to be used up and die. Just as Altair, just as Ezio, to a lesser extent Connor, and he'd had so- so much less time to use up. Reaching a crescendo at 25 after a lifetime spent trying to run away. He'd been the smart one, if only not the fastest. And good old fate and reality had come pulling him back in for a nice helping of disappointment with a lingering case of ending.

 

It all seemed such a waste of time.

 

\-----------

 

8 hours and 2 stolen cars later Shaun finds himself outside of the middle of the somewhere between what might be the upside of Trenton and nowhere. The Vault is still open, and he has no second thoughts or any thoughts at all for that matter when he slides down the pit that leads to the same. The door is gone and Juno is elsewhere, but Shaun _**Doesn't Care**_.

 

2 feet from the rock and the discarded animus equipment he all but freezes because Desmond's not _there_. He's not there, because he's here and he shouldn't be either places. The shock sets in and suddenly he can't move because this was suicide, what had he been thinking? That he could slip into a prison older than civilization and it's prisoner would just look the other way?

 

Juno is gone.

A million chances to have killed him by now and none of them taken.

 

Stepping away from his position isn't what he does so much as sprint. There's no stopping until the threshold and the bridge has been crossed until there finally is. With a sudden jarring brake there is utter stillness, because what used to be Desmond is mere meters ahead of him.

 

His hands are bruised mottled brown, black at the tips.

 

Worse than anything is the smell.

 

It's a mix between sweat and aftershave, and the funk from not having showered in a few days. There is no charcoal in the background, no cooked, rotting meat, no ozone. There may as well be nothing to note that the person in front of him has been gone for days. If he closes his eyes he could even lie to himself and envision a man shuffling in a shared sleeping bag in Italy only weeks before.

 

It's the most horrible, devastating thing Shaun has smelled in his entire life.

 

Suddenly Shaun's face is wet on the right side as he stumbles forward and remembers 2 months before with a man cold and silent as death, only not. He remembers keeping watch with the golden glow of an apple as a night light and knowing eyes as he stared on into the night. Steady beeping and soft twitching telling him all he needed, to know the man alive. There is neither now. There is nothing now. Only a man frozen in an eternal deathmask, without signs of change or decay.

 

He takes the man's face in his hands, it's eyes closed and mouth slack. He's never looked this peaceful.

 

He's never been so tired.

 

\----------

 

Days return him to the last and first member of his family. Desmond wrapped in his arms, the solid 183lb weight barely registering even after 5 more stolen cars, an abandoned Motel 6, and more of Alabama than anyone should ever have to see.

 

It's been 3 weeks. Ten seconds may as well have passed for all Desmond's body shows his now not so immediate departure.

 

Rebecca is numb and her face is wet too, she's gone to hysterical in no time flat, raging, and hitting, and slapping, and crying. She spouted nonsense and explanations of how she'd thought he'd walked off to find a place to die. That he'd killed himself, and dammit Shaun we couldn't find you! Then she notices Desmond and there's a look of hopeful apprehension on her face before Bill clocks him in the mouth and everything goes iron flavored and dark.

 

\----------

 

 

It's a few days later and Shaun is awake, but Desmond is not. He is gone and still he is not. Bill hasn't had it in him to burn him. Not since the black on his fingertips lightened to brown and then yellow.

 

Desmond's body is healing, but his heart is still and he hasn't huffed out a breath, or twitched a muscle, or woke up hungry, or taken a bloody piss on himself. Desmond is clearly dead, but his skin answers differently, so they've laid him on a pallet and cover him with a blanket when they can't bear to look at him or each other.

 

Bill hasn't spoken to him at all , to either of them, and Shaun is still nursing his swollen jaw. But sometimes Shaun wakes up in the too big sleeping bag and remembers every jab and insult, and hates himself enough to listen at the door or the van as Bill tells stories to his lost son's corpse. Sometimes he's sure Bill hears him as he whispers words of regrets long beyond any chance of repair, and Shaun cries because one of them has to.

 

\-----------

 

This cell of theirs carries on for a time as the world refuses to acknowledge what happened. Juno is long gone with no signs that she ever was and the secret war carries on as endless as it ever did. Everything had ended at a completely anticlimactic standstill.

 

 

It's 3 months later when Shaun finds himself alone again, Rebecca dead from foolish insistence on not being the tech guy, and Bill unable to look at the face of his lengthening list of mistakes. Somehow they end up back in New York (because Desmond is still here) North of what might be Trenton, in a cave where the blade sunk in and he ends it.

 

\-----------

 

A year finds two sets of footprints in the dust on the floor of an empty cave.

 

 

 

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> Fuck you Ubisoft. Fuck you, the horse you rode in on and the eight legged hell beast your craw spat out when the horse inevitably fucked you.


End file.
